If Arm Ever Arrives

43

I think there are a lot of these

Welllllll …

Lets just say it will really depend on what they do, where they fix it and how they decide to move forward with API 2

It extends beyond users
The back catalog of xDev is not super useful without translating to API 2
@eugenedakin books require rewrite/update for API 2
@bkeeney training site would have required the same kinds of updates which was not deemed worth while so it closed
any existing example code is now “old and outdated”
I’m sure @MonkeybreadSoftware had a lot of work to do to update and support API 2

This change hit EVERYTHING

The expectation that “oh they’ll just recreate it or update it” simply ignores that vast amount of time it took to get things to where they were

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45

Hi Karen,

I was actually thinking in sterling, and if you can’t live on 50k sterling (no I am not speaking of your personal circumstance, just a coder at the end of a network connection), working from home (as I think Xojo programmers do) in the current climate then maybe our subscriptions are inflated with regard to the output we see in the product.

I think the ‘notional’ value was a catalyst to understanding.
it seems there are/were recently 11 staff at Xojo.
lets be optimistic, 9 people coding the compiler/IDE or whatever.

you think 50k is too low, ok lets up it to 80k per coder.
give the admin staff 30k(currency irrelevant, just a ball park)

thats 720k for 9 coders, 60k for two support staff.
web site and all network stuff(not related to the income making stuff like Xojo Cloud) 5k,
adverts, bribing and anything else to get Xojo in the spotlight(I am joking about the bribing by the way) 20k per year.

lets add misc stuff that I have no idea about, 200,000.

thats about a million xyz’s a year.

now lets look at us, the subscribers.

hard core must pay every year guys (which Christian suggests are the golden egg)

lets say 500, all doing enterprise at 2k, we get our million immediately.

the rest of us way less important people.

lets say 1000 of us are on auto renew at 600 per pop.
2000 are on desktop at 99 per pop auto renew
random people renewing every few years at all sorts of levels, say 500,000 per year.

if I was anywhere close to potential income in this whimsical note then I personally don’t know why there are only 9 people coding, even giving them 200,000 each, we do not get anywhere near the income the company must be attaining.

we will obviously never have any figures to indicate anything suggested above (and why should we, its not our business) but the excuse that there is not enough money in the pot to cover all the areas the compiler is going because they can not afford engineers just seems to be less convincing, unless there are only 100 premium users and everyone else using Xojo is on the forum, giving a total of 1000 users across the whole user base with an average of less than is needed to support the addition of engineers.

46

I dont think they have ever said “we cant afford engineers” have they ?
The only recent statement I can recall is “we’re appropriately staffed”

47

You should see some other discussion areas, makes my complications seem pale in comparison.

I am in agreement with you regarding API 2.0 It was and is detrimental to the product. Like Swift was/is to the creation of software using Apple’s tools. Sure there’s some excitement from some developers, look I’ve finally figured out how to do something simple with this new language.

Overall, it’s a step backwards and nullifies one of the best ways for new developers to learn, that is existing code.

But that doesn’t negate the fact that to develop for Apple’s platforms now have a huge tax on time, which does reduce Xojo’s ability to do work on their own plans.

As someone who still uses 2018r3 daily, I can sympathize. Although my reason for sticking with this version is because of the SDK change, which screwed up most of my apps. Every few months, I again compile my apps in a newer version of Xojo and sit down and try to figure out what’s now broken and solutions for it.

48

I just assumed Norm’s 100K was in US dollars as Xojo is US based, so I assumed you were talking US dollars too!

-Karen

49

I am corrected sir! no they have never said they can not afford engineers that I have ever advertized.

to be honest I can not say I have heard them say anything regarding staffing levels (I would not expect them to do that), I apologise, I just assumed that the company was bouncing along the line of income and engineer support where sometimes there is enough money to get someone in to do a job and when an engineer is too expensive, or too much trouble, they dump them, my bad, its a perception I hold about the company and quite obviously not supported by any fact or notion gleaned from any other member of any Xojo related forum.

I honestly have held the belief that issues with Xojo, eg. its random target support, abandoning of initial platforms (iOS, Pi), abandoning API1, Web1(it has issues but is viable),
throwing all users who have no need or wish to move beyond 19r, under the bus, were completely down to a financial issue where Xojo simply did not have any way to sort the mess out because there was not enough money in the pot.

if money is not the issue then, am I the only person to be utterly astonished by the thought that the team is intentionally maintained well below the threshold required to fix all the thousands of bugs in the system, to work on the features currently the supposed points leader suggests and the abandoned iOS.

I am a business man, I just do not understand the Xojo business model at all (and I am an outside the box thinker for sure), the potential is (for now) absolutely huge, that opportunity is seemingly narrowing at an alarming rate.

Norm your recant “we’re appropriately staffed”, wow, if this is the companies position, I just do not have the words to deal with that (I do but, that was a pause for effect!).

as an outside viewer, looking at things from a customer perspective, I might suggest there is a need of 3 to 5 more engineers and someone who is customer focused on the forum to support the users.

if they can afford to employ more engineers then why not get them in.

bleh, its getting very boring trying to follow this road, please Xojo click your heels, we are all waiting for you to come home.

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50

haha, Karen, no I never think about anything ‘us’, Norman is in Canada, I am in Spain, there is a lot of the earth that is not in that tiny space known as north america, outside america, america is not, in my experience, a topic of any import.

51

I am astonished that that this topic was so supported and has plenty of elements to stir members.
I think its gone off topic now, please lock.

52

We dont lock threads here :slight_smile:

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53

oh, ok, YAY! for no lock, just thought the subject was thrashed to death, lock does not mean bad, just maybe ‘moving on’?

54

On topic; ARM is arriving as early as 10 days away.

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Moving on happens naturally when nobody posts in a thread. Therefore no need to lock. People only lock when they want to stop a conversation - I leave it up to you to guess their motives …

56

Yea, there is a large amount of time and work to update my books. My rough estimate is at least 2-years to update most of the books…maybe longer.

Then there is additional time to create the updates that I have been sent emails.

While I am updating, there isn’t time for new content, such as new books. Sure, I can add a new example or two while rewriting the book. Chuckle, my declares book is over 1,000 pages. My poor proofreader went cross-eyed, and I am sure I have grammatical errors…

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57

It’s always fun to reverse engineer how much revenue Xojo Inc. makes.

But supporting Mac ARM as compiler option could give Xojo Inc. a boost as all developers interested in Mac will have to get a current license.

58

I have no doubt Xojo can get ARM working on Mac quickly. I suspect these desktop grade versions will have many cores and thats where Xojo fails. Everything being tied to a single core really dooms it in such a scenario.

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59

API 2 works just fine and it’s all I use. When 2020r1 is released I’ll be able to fix my last deprecation warning.

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60

It’s a limitation, for sure, but I think “dooms” overstates the situation. There are certainly some applications that require multiple cores, but I’ve developed dozens of applications over the past 20 years and not a single one of them has needed it. A few would have benefited from it, but most of them really don’t need it. I mean, I’ve been using 4-core/8-thread CPUs for the last 8 years, and recently upgraded my main Mac to an 8-core/16-thread CPU, and there are very few applications that use more than one core, even fewer that actually need to, and the fact my Xojo applications don’t has not been an issue. So, for some developers a lack of a good multicore option will exclude Xojo, but I don’t know if the impact will amount to doom.

61

According to the leaks (who knows where, too many people involved, from US to Taiwan) there are 3 processors being made by Apple for “desktops” (include notebooks here) at TSMC. And probably all have at least 12 cores, 8 fast, 4 low power, as this one seems the one already in a RTM state. Those 12 cores when working as planned (threading + multiprocess sharing memory + fast interprocess communications) makes this thing fly, but just one active core shared by your multiple tasks, will go just the opposite way. The prior SUPPOSED release date was 1rst quarter 2021, but seems that things are getting more and more realistic and MAYBE we see something already this year. People say WWDC WILL really announce it, BECAUSE that’s the ONLY chance to do a proper public announcement before the release. So forget “IF ARM ever arrives”, the question is just which month in the next 12 it will be.

62

I think it is the opposed way, if your computer language is not multithread ready, and don’t have features like Tasks, Futures and Async/Await that can take advantages behind the scenes, some frameworks can get the most of the system like in networking, databases, serial comm, etc behind the scenes. It’s very hard to find an “one thread” only language in the XXI century.

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63

Exactly. It’s not so much that Xojo won’t be usable or “doomed” as a platform but doomed compared to the competition. Almost every other language/framework will feel significantly faster and also by the way cost nothing.

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